This morning, our Old Testament passage comes to us from Genesis chapter 27, and this will be verses one through 29. Genesis chapter 27, beginning with verse one. When Isaac was old and his eyes were dim so that he could not see, he called Esau, his older son, and said to him, my son. And Esau answered, here I am. Isaac said, behold, I am old. I do not know the day of my death. Now then, take your weapons, your quiver and your bow, and go out to the field and hunt game for me, and prepare for me delicious food such as I love, and bring it to me so that I may eat, that my soul may bless you before I die. Now, Rebekah was listening when Isaac spoke to his son Esau. So when Esau went to the field to hunt for game and bring it, Rebekah said to her son Jacob, I heard your father speak to your brother Esau. Bring me game and prepare for me delicious food that I may eat it and bless you before the Lord before I die. Now, therefore, my son, obey my voice as I command you. Go to the flock and bring me two good young goats so that I may prepare from them delicious food for your father, such as he loves. And you shall bring it to your father to eat so that he may bless you before he dies.' But Jacob said to Rebekah, his mother, behold, my brother Esau is a hairy man and I am a smooth man. Perhaps my father will feel me and I shall seem to be mocking him and bring a curse upon myself and not a blessing. His mother said to him, let your curse be on me, my son, only obey my voice and go, bring them to me. So he went and took them and brought them to his mother and his mother prepared delicious food such as his father loved. Then Rebecca took the best garments of Esau, her older son, which were with her in the house, and put them on Jacob, her younger son, and the skins of the younger goats she put on his hands and on the smooth part of his neck. And she put the delicious food and the bread which she had prepared into the hand of her son Jacob. So he went into his father and said, my father. And he said, here I am. Who are you, my son? Jacob said to his father, I am Esau, your firstborn. I've done as you told me. Now sit up and eat of my game that your soul may bless me. But Isaac said to his son, how is it that you have found it so quickly, my son? He answered. because the Lord your God granted me success. Then Isaac said to Jacob, please come near that I may feel you, my son, to know whether you are really my son Esau or not. So Jacob went near to Isaac, his father, who felt him and said, the voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. And he did not recognize him because his hands were hairy like his brother Esau's hands. So he blessed him. He said, are you really my son Esau? He answered, I am. Then he said, bring it near to me that I may eat of my son's game and bless you. So he brought it near to him and he ate. And he brought him wine and he drank. Then his father Isaac said to him, come near and kiss me, my son. So he came near and kissed him. And Isaac smelled the smell of his garments and blessed him and said, see, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed. May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth and plenty of grain and wine. Let people serve you and nations bow down to you. Be Lord over your brothers and may your mother's sons bow down to you. Cursed be everyone who curses you and blessed be everyone who blesses you. This is the word of the Lord. Now, our sermon text this morning is from Ephesians chapter 5, verses 1 through 8. And you'll find this on page 978 of your Pew Bibles. And I'll explain in a moment, but we'll be focusing on the first two verses there. So especially be mindful of those that is read, but I will read up through verse 8 of chapter 5, beginning with the first verse. Therefore, be imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. Let there be no filthiness, nor foolish talk, nor crude joking, which are out of place. But instead, let there be thanksgiving, For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure or who is covetous, that is an idolater, has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words. For because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore, do not become partners with them. For at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light. This is the word of the Lord. Let us pray. Father God, your word is set before us. Some of it is hard and difficult to read. Some of it challenges us in ways we do not expect. May we be changed by it. May it be effectual, as your word always is. May you, your spirit, be present, working in us, enlightening us, and setting our hearts at rest, nowhere but upon your son. In whose name we pray, amen. So now we're in the first verse of chapter five. There's a real sense in which we have been all along working through one section of Paul's letter to the Ephesians that really began with the 17th verse in chapter 4. So if you were to turn back to that, you would see there that Paul writes, now this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. That is that since the 17th verse in chapter 4, Paul has been, and will continue to in chapter five, been instructing us not to imitate the world, but instead to imitate God. Or we might take verse 17 and take verse 1 of chapter 5 and push them together and make them as a summary of all that Paul is saying here in this way. He might be saying this, since you are God's beloved children, you must no longer imitate the world. Instead, imitate your father. And now you see in the fifth chapter, what Paul is unfolding is how we are to imitate God. And this section in the fifth chapter, it continues on through the 21st verse. And in fact, when I was first laying out my sermon series, initially the sermon was going to be verses 1 through 21 of chapter 5. And then I saw sanity, we might say, and reduced it and saw that actually in chapter 5, Paul describes how we are to imitate God through the language of walking. How we walk is how we imitate God. And he gives us three ways in the course of chapter 5 how we are to imitate God by walking. The first is that we are to walk in love, and we find that in the second verse. The next way we find it in verse 8. We are to walk in light. And then the final one in the 15th verse is that we are to walk not as the unwise, but as the wise. So that Paul says, in other words, that imitating God involves walking in love, in light, and in wisdom. So you can see, once I saw that, I said, well, really, there are three sermons here, walking in love, being the first, walking in light, the second walking in wisdom, the third. But this morning, I actually, I won't say this morning, but as I was working on the sermon for this week, I realized really that first sermon is really itself becomes two sermons. That there's so much here in these first seven and eight verses, that if we were to unfold them all this morning, we would be here all morning and all afternoon. So I've divided that too, I've split that up as well. Instead, we're gonna be focusing this morning, as I said, on the first two verses. We're not going to be examining the next several, because you see, the structure of those first seven verses is this. In verses one and two, in the second verse particularly, Paul defines what it is to walk in love. It is to imitate the one who has loved us, it is to imitate Christ. Then in verses three and four, he focuses practically what it means to walk in love. And he focuses there on avoiding sexual immorality, avoiding covetousness, avoiding foolish talk. Describing those as particularly characteristic of the life that walks in the love of Christ. And then he concludes that in verses five through seven with a final warning of the consequence of not imitating our God and Father in love. But as I said, there's enough in the first two verses, particularly there's enough in verse two, to be a sermon unto its own self, to be a sermon in its own right. And our attention will be there this week. And that's really important. Because if we don't get and understand what is being told to us, what is being spoken to us in the second verse, then we will misunderstand and misapply what is being told to us in verses three and four. That is, we need to understand as we come to Paul's commands with regard to sexual immorality, with regard to covetousness, with regard to impurity, with regard to foolish speech, that those are sub-points. Those are even sub-headings under the command to walk in love. That if they are not seen that way, if we attempt to obey Paul by an obedience to those commands that is devoid of walking in love, we will be no better than the pagans. We will be no better than the pagans. And I'll circle back to that as to why. Because Paul is doing something here when he tells us to imitate God. Because Paul compares our love to the love of Christ, which is itself described here as a fragrant offering, you'll find that I will use a theme this morning of the scent, of the scent of love, of the scent of Christ, that that will be kind of our uniting theme, that the command here is not just to feel love, It's not just to express affections, but it is to give off a scent. It is to give off a scent of Christ, a scent of Christ that is ultimately expressed in dying. That the love that we are called to imitate, the scent of Christ that we are called to imitate is the scent of dying to ourselves. It is one of death. We are to follow in the steps of love and through such love die to ourselves. And that's why Paul can elsewhere say that such a scent of our love can smell to others like death. It can smell repulsive. And that's important to see here, that what's being expressed here to our natural hearts will smell repulsive. But as we are renewed in the spirit, it will begin to smell sweet. So be aware of that. This is a difficult passage. It is a difficult passage to take and apply to ourselves because it demands so much of us. Because of this, because of our natural inclination to draw back from this type of love, I want us to unfold and unpack it then through Christ's love, that we might be so in love with the fragrant offering of Christ that he himself has given up for us that we then in Thanksgiving may be prepared to walk in this love, that we may be prepared to give off the smell of Christ as he gives off the smell of God to us. that indeed we will begin to smell like Christ. We will begin to smell like God because we will be imitating him. The message this morning is this, that it's a call that we would smell like Christ and it's a call that's founded on the fact that Christ has first poured out his love upon us. He has poured out his fragrance upon us. And he has already made us to be the sons of God. He has already made us to smell like God. And so Paul is saying, therefore, since you smell like God, all the more give off the scent of God. That's the message this morning. And there will be three points. The first is the scent of Christ. The second is clothed in his scent. And the third, breathing in and out his scent. That will be the application of how we are to live it out. But the first is this, the scent of Christ. As I said, the scent of Christ is love. He smells of love. That is the aroma that Christ gives off in this passage. It is the aroma of God's love for us. Christ not only sets before us the goodness of God. He not only shows us what it looks like to imitate God. but by setting God before us, he establishes the foundation of that which we imitate. To imitate God, really, you see, what I want you to see, as Paul calls us to imitate God, it is really to imitate the one, it is to respond to the one. who has first loved us. We love because he first loved us. We imitate him because he has loved us. The love that we imitate is the love that he has shown us. And that is, it is to walk in love with the one who has walked in love for us first. And there will be three sub points here to really drive this home. The first is, Only children imitate their father. That's really important to see here. And this will get back to my comment about the pagans that I made earlier. So the first point is this, only children imitate their father. The second point is this, Christ, he is the scent of God to us. The third point, what I said already about the scent of death, is what we'll be getting into there, what he smells like. But the first point is this, only children imitate their father. It is important, you see, to not lose sight of the fact that when Paul calls us to imitate God, he appends to that, he grounds that command in the fact that we are beloved children of God. We have been, as he said in verses four and five of chapter one, we have been adopted by God to be his sons, all of us. Recall, and I've said this before, Paul uses the language of sonship for all of us, both men and women. Yes, elsewhere in Scripture it speaks of us as being daughters and sons of God. But here he speaks of sons because he's speaking of our inheritance, that we all, irregardless of whether we are men or women, as those in Christ, we receive the inheritance of God and we are treated as his beloved sons in Christ. Indeed, I would say we're treated as if we are his firstborn. And we'll get to that in a moment. But here, we see that it is because he is our father that we are called to imitate him. If he weren't our father, we wouldn't be able to imitate him. Understand that. You see, the pagan philosophers of Paul's day thought that you could. They thought that you could, despite not being a child of God, you could imitate God. Plato, for example, he taught that men were to imitate God as well. He also spoke in that language, and he would say that they were to become like God as far as possible. And to become like God, says Plato, is to become righteous. It is to become holy. It is to become wise. Now those three sound very similar, don't they, to what Paul describes under the terms of love, light, and wisdom. And in fact, as I had us read the entirety of the passage with regard to love, the commandment to love includes with it righteousness. So they sound very similar at first glance. But there's a difference. First of all, because Paul limits imitation to the beloved children of the Father, but also because he limits it to those to whom Christ has shown his love to. And the point here is the relationship. There is a relationship that must be established first. Plato, for Plato, there is no relationship between man and God. There's no personal relationship. But for Paul, there is. There's a relationship that is similar between that between a father and a son, or even between a husband and a wife, or even between a brother and sister. There's real relationship there. And because we are the father's children, we are therefore able to imitate the father. We, like all children, children are mimics, are they not? As you watch your children, they're an awful lot like you. Isn't the frustrating thing about dealing with your children's sins that their sins are so much like your sins? that they pick up the same headstrongness that you have, that they pick up the same type of anger issues that you have, that they pick up the same sort of weaknesses that you have. They mimic you. We mimic our parents for good and for bad. Well, our Heavenly Father is all good. And because he is our father, we imitate him. We follow after him. If he is not our father, then who is our father? The serpent. And it is he whom we imitate. It is he whom the world imitates. Paul underlines this, I would say, by drawing our attention to the love with which Christ loved us. It is striking, isn't it, that Paul, as I said, Paul lists love instead of righteousness. He could have listed righteousness, but he lists love, love as something which is inclusive here of righteousness. But true love, you see, has to do with the affections, and it has to do with relationship. You cannot love somebody who you do not know. You can say you love them. You can say, well, I love the Christians who are over on the other side of the world. But I truly do not love them because I'm truly not in a real relationship with them. Do you see that? The love that I have is really abstract. But the love that Paul calls for us to be involved in is concrete. It has to do with loving the person who I live with. Boy, that's really hard. It's easy to love the person on the other side of the world. It's hard to love the person who you're next to. I mean, put it crassly, it's kind of easier to love Hitler than to love the people you know. Because at least Hitler's far away. I mean, he's dead at least. But the people you know, you live with them day by day. They sin against you day by day. They have their annoying tics day by day. That's where the real love is and it's in the relationship. And that is where real righteousness appears. It appears in that relationship. We are commanded to love as those who are in relationship with God. It is because Christ loved us and loved us with a sacrificial love that we are now called to love. Let me put it another way. Again, righteousness can be taken in a very abstract sense. And that's what we did until we came into Christ. We took righteousness in an abstract sense. We said, well, I'm pretty much a good guy. I'm a nice guy. I make my mistakes. But when we come into that relationship with Christ, when our righteousness gets grounded in the affectionate relationship, then we realize how unrighteous we are. Then we realize how conniving we are. Then we realize how resistant we are, how unloving we are. We are commanded, we are brought into this relationship. That is central. So I say that and I want to make it clear here that we are commanded to love because our God loves us. The command of love comes in and through our relationship to our God. And so what can be said of this can also then, further down the line, be said of light and of wisdom. And that's the beauty here. And that's what I'm saying. This is more than just an abstract concept. This is where the rubber meets the road. That is, Christ, our God, he does not shine his light in the abstract. He shines his light upon us. He is not wise in the abstract. He is wise in his dealings with us. Indeed, we might go further as we understand the Godhead and say this, in his love towards us, he is both full of light and full of wisdom. His love is an expression of his light and his wisdom towards us. In his light towards us, he shows us his love, and he shows us his wisdom. In his wisdom towards us, he gives us love, and he gives us light. The call to imitate God in love, light, and wisdom is grounded in the fact that our God has shown towards us his love, his light, and his wisdom in making us his sons. So that was that first sub-point. Second point, Christ is the scent of God to us. Christ being now the perfect image of the Father is the revelation of God's love to us. He is the perfect revelation of God's love to us. He is a thinking of love as a scent. He is the scent of God to us. When we smell of Christ, we smell of the Father. And this can be discerned under that language in the second verse, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Christ is that scent. As much as Christ is a fragrant offering, you see, to the Father, so also that fragrance of Christ is meant to fill our nostrils as well. In him, as we see him in the pages, as we see him in his life, we are to smell the scent of love, we are to smell the scent of light, we are to smell the scent of wisdom. But the scent of God's love for us as Paul is particularly made acute in his sacrifice, or in what we would call his humiliation. In systematics and theology, we speak of Christ's humiliation. We speak of his humiliation, and we speak of his exaltation. And for example, the Westminster Shorter Catechism will ask in question 27, wherein did Christ's humiliation consist? And the answer is Christ's humiliation consisted in his being born, and that in a low condition, and made under the law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of God, and the curse of death of the cross, and being buried and continuing under the power of death for a time. You see, his humiliation, his giving himself for us, is not limited only to his death on the cross. Certainly, in a very real sense. The most visible representation of his misery, his humiliation, is on the cross. But it begins a long time before that. His humiliation begins with his taking on flesh in the fullness of time, and his being born of a woman, and his growing up in a family from childhood to adulthood, learning discipline all his life. And he was a real man. He studied the scriptures. He sang and memorized the Psalms. He taught his disciples. He sat with them. He ate with them. He healed the sick. He raised the dead. And all of this, you see, we must, as it were, circle, in Paul's words, we must circle it with a bright colored pen and point at it and say, he did this for me. This is where Christ was expressing his love for me in offering himself up as a fragrant sacrifice to our God. That is, he showed me love by taking on flesh. He showed me love by being born of a woman. He showed me love in suffering the discipline of sinful parents. growing up upon this earth. He showed me love in laboring as a carpenter alongside of his father. He showed me love in singing and memorizing the Psalms. He showed me love in living those 33 years of his life, always awaiting his death upon the cross. At every moment, he was more than capable, more than able of pulling his hand back. of us that were throwing in the towel. But all that time, as it were, he kept his hand in the flame. Out of love for me. Out of love for you. He paid then for every last sin of mine, every last sin of yours, because he loved us. All of this is featured under Christ's love for us. All of this is featured under his giving himself up for us. This is the love which he has offered up as a fragrant offering to the Father. And this is the love which we smell when we smell Christ. And what does this love smell like? It smells like death. The fragrant offering smells like death. It smells to those whose hearts are not at rest in the love of Christ. It is a fragrance from death to death. It is the smell of the flesh of animals burning. It is the smell of annihilation. It is because, you see, the center of love is death. And the love that we are being called to imitate in God is a love that takes us to the grave. That's the type of love that we're being called to. That's the type of love that has been expressed here. Christ loved us in dying for us every day until the cross, until he cried out, it is finished. As I said, he was as like a man who has put his hand in the flame, willingly, and did not pull his hand back until the task was done. That is what true love is. It is a love that finds its center in death. Real love, the imitation of God, involves dying. Paul, you see, is not calling us to an easy thing when he says to us to imitate God and to walk in love. He is calling us to a hard thing. He is calling us to love those who are our enemies. He is calling us to suffer in our love. He is calling us to, in many ways, to lose ourselves in our love. Indeed, he is calling us to what will always appear to our fleshly eyes, to the eyes of Plato. To be impossible, and it is a love that we can only walk in if he has already loved us first if he has already made us to be children of God. It is because of that that we can walk in it. And that gets to our second point. The second point this morning is that we are clothed in his scent. Indeed, we are already clothed in his scent. God has prepared us for this task of love by clothing us in that scent of death. That scent of death, which to us, as we are clothed in it, it becomes delightful. It becomes beautiful. It becomes powerful. He makes us willing. God makes us willing and able to love with a love that demands our dying because he has already united us with Christ in his death. We, you and I, have already died. The hard part is already out of the way. We are already dead in Christ because in him we have died and we've been born again in him. And he does so He does so by clothing us in Christ. As John puts it, and this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. So I'm going to get from that to how he clothes us in Christ. And the way I do that is I want us to think about the offering, the scent of the offering, the propitiation offering. As you think about that scent, you can think about it this way. You can think about it in the same way that Noah made an offering. Recall back in Genesis 8. If you turn there in your Bibles now to Genesis chapter 8, you'll find there, you'll find in your Bibles, you'll find that Noah has exited the ark. God has delivered Noah through the flood, and he's brought him out of the ark. And now in verse 20, Noah builds an altar. So follow along in verse 20. Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I've done. While the earth remains sea time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease." You see, the aroma, the sacrifice, the sacrifice which Noah sets on the altar, it's a thanks offering for delivering him and his family through the flood. And it is set there by faith before God. And because it is given in faith, in faith in God's goodness and his grace, it is acceptable and pleasing in God's sight. And therefore, God covenants with the earth. He covenants that he will never again destroy the earth as he did in the flood. Indeed, he will ultimately sustain and uphold the seasons of the earth until the end of the ages. But Noah was a sinner. And that's why we say he sacrificed in faith. He did not sacrifice in personal righteousness. He sacrificed in faith and in thanksgiving. But God with Christ. Christ was not a sinner. He was righteous. And he, as he sacrificed himself, to the Father, in obedience to the Father, the Father was pleased to receive the aroma of the Son as lifted up to him, and therefore accepts us as we are in Christ, so that he will never again curse us. We are, as it were, covered up in the aroma of Christ. so that we will never again be cursed. Rather, we will be renewed in Christ, even though before Christ's spirit enters into us, we ourselves, in our attentions, are always and ever evil. It is by Christ's righteousness that we enter in. And this is, by the way, it's a fulfillment of another promise. A promise, if you turn with me again, if you turn with me to Ezekiel, one of the prophets, Ezekiel chapter 20, And this will be verses 40 and following if you turn there, Ezekiel chapter 20 verse 40, this is where God is speaking to the people. And he's prophesying for on my holy mountain. Verse 40, the mountain height of Israel declares the Lord God, there all the house of Israel, all of them shall serve me in the land. There I will accept them and there I will require your contributions and the choicest of your gifts with all your sacred offerings. And then this is the important verse 41, as a pleasing aroma I will accept you. when I bring you out from the peoples and gather you out of the countries where you have been scattered. And I will manifest my holiness among you in the sight of the nations. And you shall know that I am the Lord when I bring you into the land of Israel, the country that I swore to give to your fathers. And there you shall remember your ways and all your deeds with which you have defiled yourselves. And you shall loathe yourselves for all the evils that you have committed. And you shall know that I am the Lord when I deal with you for my namesake, not according to your evil ways, nor according to your corrupt deeds, O house of Israel, declares the Lord God. See there in Ezekiel is the prophecy that God will gather again his people to himself. And not only will they offer up sacrifices, but they themselves, he says, will be as a perfumed sacrifice to him. He will smell the scent of them and it will be lovely. Christ has covered us in his scent so that we are like that sacrifice. We are that sacrifice that has been gathered from the nations and ascends on high before the Father and enters his nostrils and he is well pleased with us already. Not for what we have done, as the Lord says to the people in Ezekiel 40, right? He says, you will know that you are wicked and that I'm not dealing with you according to your unrighteousness. No, why not? Because he's dealing with them according to Christ's righteousness. He's dealing with us according to Christ's righteousness. We smell of Christ. We have his scent on us. And that's why I had us read that passage in Genesis, that account of Jacob and Esau, and how Isaac wants to bless Esau. And he sends Esau, his firstborn son, off And then Rebecca comes up with a way to steal the blessing for Jacob. Has Jacob wear Esau's clothing? Why? So that he smells like Esau, because Isaac's eyes have grown dim. The difference is Christ, as our elder brother, he's not the one being tricked. He is not being the one made a fool of. Rather, he himself has dressed us in his robes. He has put his garments on us. And the father, he is not shortsighted. He is part of this too. But still, as he looks upon us, he sees Christ, he smells Christ. We already have his aroma on us. You and I, we already smell of that smell. We have already died with Christ. We have already been raised up to new life. We already have that scent on us. And that leads us then to the third point, breathing in and out his scent, giving off that aroma, walking in love. How do we do that? And the answer to that, the answer to how we are to love as he loved us, is this. First, we can't. Because, let me be serious about this. We cannot do what Christ did for us, right? His love for us, his sacrifice for us was an atonement for our sin. He was made a propitiation for our sins. We cannot atone for one another's sins. We cannot hang on the cross for one another. We cannot substitute ourselves for one another. You know, as an example, many of us, I imagine all of us recall, maybe some of us don't, years ago the big theme was WWJD. You would wear that as a bracelet or you'd put that as a bumper sticker on your car and it was all fine and dandy. But then you get to the realization That the problem with saying, what would Jesus do, for those who don't know what WWJD stands for, what would Jesus do is that there's a lot that Christ does that we can't do. He is our high priest. We cannot be a high priest. He is our king. We cannot be king. He is our prophet. We cannot be prophet. Now, we are, in a lowercase sense, priests, prophets, and kings. But we cannot be the high priest. We cannot be the high king. And we cannot be the high prophet. Many of the things which he does, which are associated with his office, are not ours to do. But where he gives a sacrifice, a propitiation for our sins, where he is a substitutionary atonement for us, we give sacrifices of thanksgiving. That's how we imitate him. That is, we might say there's an analogical relationship here between what he has done and what we do. His fragrant offering before the Lord was one of propitiation. It was one of covering our sins. Our fragrant offering before the Lord is more like that of Noah's. It's a thank offering. God, you have delivered me through the flood, and now I give this offering in thanksgiving for what you have done for me. We love with a love like his out of a thankful heart for the love with which he has shown us. That is, we breathe in the aroma of his love. And then we breathe it out at Thanksgiving. That's what's being expressed here. Think about that. You breathe an aroma deep, a smell, and then you can breathe it out and you smell that smell once again. Sometimes it's not a pleasurable thought, but sometimes that can be quite beautiful as well. And here that is, as we breathe in, as we reflect upon what he has done for us and what he continues to do for us. That then enters into our hearts. It causes our hearts to overflow with Thanksgiving. And by that Thanksgiving, we find that our lives are reshaped, are renewed, and we are enabled to take that which once smelled like death to death. and to live it as life to life, as Paul would say. It becomes fragrant, it becomes lovely to us. We rediscover, you see, how very big our God is. And we discover gratitude, not just for our lives, but for the shape of our lives. You'll notice next week, you'll notice in verse four, that after he has called us away from sexual immorality, covetousness, inappropriate behavior, inappropriate speech, he then calls us to thanksgiving. It is through thankful hearts of gratitude that rest upon what he has done, that we are enabled to love with a love like Christ, even a love that calls us to die. How do we love with that love which requires us to die? We do so by breathing deeply of the love of Christ. We do so by resting on what he has done, by meditating upon what he continues to do, by seeing how the spirit takes that and applies that to us and builds us up in that. Christ, you see, has poured out his love upon us. He has perfumed us with his love. Let us be breathing deeply that love, that it may produce in us thankful hearts that enable us to love with a love like his, a love that dies knowing that it will be raised again. Let us pray. Father God, you have called us. to die in Christ. Indeed, you have already crucified us with Christ and have raised us anew, that we are new creatures. May you so cause us to rest in the knowledge of this love that you've shown us in this, that we would be enabled to walk in love, in the same love as Christ loved us, that we might offer ourselves before you as sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving. These are hard things, and we confess that they are hard for us. May you open our eyes to your son and so nourish and encourage us in them, knowing that we already bear his scent upon us and that we are your beloved children. We pray this in your son's name. Amen.